More than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts

MORE THAN NIGHT

FILM NOIR IN ITS CONTEXTS

James Naremore

Updated and Expanded Edition

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© 1998, 2008 by The Regents of the University

of California

ISBN: 978–0-520–25402-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)

The Library of Congress has cataloged an earlier

edition of this book as follows:

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Naremore, James.

     More than night : Film noir in its contexts /

James Naremore.

          p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN: 0–520-21294–0 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Film noir—History and criticism. I. Title.

PN1995.9.F54N37 1998

791.43’655—dc21

97–33090

Manufactured in the United States of America

17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is printed on Natures Book, which

contains 50% post-consumer waste and meets

the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO

Z39.48–1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

For Darlene, who made it possible;

for Alex and Patrick, who may someday read it;

and in memory of Bernard Benstock,

mentor and friend,

who knew Double Indemnity by heart.

The streets were dark with something more than night.

RAYMOND CHANDLER,

The Simple Art of Murder, 1944

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PREFACE TO THE 2008 EDITION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION: THIS IS WHERE I CAME IN

1. THE HISTORY OF AN IDEA

Noir Is Born: Paris, 1946–1959

Darkness Everywhere

2. MODERNISM AND BLOOD MELODRAMA: THREE CASE STUDIES

Believing in Nothing

Sympathy for the Devil

The Death Chamber

3. FROM DARk FILMS TO BLACk LISTS: CENSORSHIP AND POLITICS

Bourbon with a Bourbon Chaser

The Snakes Are Loose

After 1947

4. LOW IS HIGH: BUDGETS AND CRITICAL DISCRIMINATION

B Pictures Versus Intermediates

Post-B Pictures

5. OLD IS NEW: STYLES OF NOIR

Black and White and Red

Parody, Pastiche, Fashion

6. THE OTHER SIDE OF THE STREET

Asia

Latin America

Africa

7. THE NOIR MEDIASCAPE

8. NOIR IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Legends and Lists

Further Research

More Styles of Noir

Noir Never Dies

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figs. 1–3. Laura, The Woman in the Window, and The Lost Weekend

Fig. 4. The psychotic veteran in Taxi Driver

Fig. 5. A postmodern image of film noir

Fig. 6. Noir as fashion

Figs. 7–9. City Streets, The Maltese Falcon, and Satan Met a Lady

Fig. 10. Promotion for The Maltese Falcon

Fig. 11. Alan Ladd in This Gun for Hire

Fig. 12. Richard Attenborough in Brighton Rock

Fig. 13. Orson Welles in The Third Man

Fig. 14. Harry Lime (Orson Welles), crucified in a sewer in The Third Man

Fig. 15. Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck at Jerry’s in Double Indemnity

Fig. 16. Close-up of Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity

Figs. 17–18. Publicity stills from the lost ending of Double Indemnity

Figs. 19–20. Alan Ladd and Will Wright in the revised ending of The Blue Dahlia

Fig. 21. Paul Kelly in Crossfire

Fig. 22. Robert Ryan in Crossfire

Fig. 23. The death of Dix Handley in The Asphalt Jungle

Fig. 24. The mother’s embrace in The Manchurian Candidate

Fig. 25. Tom Neal in Detour

Fig. 26. Close-up of eyes in Detour

Fig. 27. The haunted coffee cup in Detour

Fig. 28. Mike Hammer as Playboy male in Kiss Me Deadly

Fig. 29. Turning Mickey Spillane upside down

Fig. 30. Killer’s Kiss

Fig. 31. Murder by Contract

Fig. 32. Tommy Lee Jones in Gotham

Figs. 33–38. Contrast lighting (Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer in Out of the Past)

Figs. 39–40. Clothing as contrast in Out of the Past

Figs. 41–43. Fill lighting and liners in Out of the Past

Figs. 44–45. Lighting exterior sets in Out of the Past

Figs. 46–47. Jimmy Valentine lighting in Out of the Past

Figs. 48–51. Eroticism and mystery light in Out of the Past

Fig. 52. Actors posed against an empty set in Exterior Night

Fig. 53. The Girl Hunt ballet in The Band Wagon

Fig. 54. Retro style in Chinatown

Figs. 55–56. Dream Sequence from Moonlighting

Fig. 57. Retro killers in Pulp Fiction

Fig. 58. Theresa Harris and Caleb Peterson in Out of the Past

Fig. 59. The private eye as White Negro in Kiss Me Deadly

Fig. 60. Harry Belafonte in Odds against Tomorrow

Fig. 61. Richard Roundtree in Shaft

Fig. 62. Denzel Washington in Devil in a Blue Dress25

Fig. 63. Noir remade: Steven Soderbergh’s Underneath

Fig. 64. Art film or neo-noir? Billy Bob Thornton in Sling Blade

Fig. 65. Noir as a dream: Patricia Arquette in Lost Highway

Fig. 66. Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx in Collateral

Figs. 67–68. Graphic designs in Sin City

Fig. 69. Clive Owen in Croupier

Fig. 70. Naomi Watts and Laura Elena Harring in Mulholland Dr.

PREFACE TO THE

2008 EDITION

More Than Night was an unusually pleasurable book to write, and when I looked back at it after almost ten years in order to prepare a new edition, I was surprised at how little I wanted to change. I might have enjoyed writing at greater length about a larger number of films, but the scope of the book necessarily limited the opportunity to discuss many of my favorite pictures in detail. I chose instead to view noir from a series of seven broad vantage points, and in the process I pushed against the normal boundaries of the term, insisting that it can’t be neatly defined, that it isn’t exclusively American, and that the discourse surrounding it is largely a postmodern development. I continue to believe that this is the best way to understand film noir, but I must admit that in a few cases my approach required me to concentrate on the margins rather than the center of the noir category. I should perhaps emphasize that even though I’ve questioned the assumptions behind many earlier writings, I agree with all previous commentators that the beating heart of film noir can be located in Hollywood during the 1940s and 1950s. This was a period when the industry regularly turned out modest, relatively unsung thrillers, often produced according to formula and released without fanfare, that were nearly always worth seeing. Even today, some of the lesser known films of the type—to mention only two, Roy William Neill’s Black Angel (1946) and John Berry’s Tension (1949)— remain deeply satisfying exercises in style and storytelling. Such films are the truest kind of noir, and fortunately we have access to increasing numbers of them on cable TV and DVD. I’ve listed a good many of their titles in the pages that follow.

This new edition of More Than Night involves no radical changes in the original text but enables me to correct several factual errors that have been pointed out by friends and reviewers. It also enables me to write a new chapter in which I expand on some basic issues, review some recent literature, and discuss examples of film noir from the first decade of the twenty-first century. For advice and help with this task I owe special thanks to Jonathan Rosenbaum and to several other individuals: Dudley Andrew, Barbara Klinger, Veronica Pravadelli, Robert Rehak, Francois Thomas, and, as always, Darlene J. Sadlier. At the University of California Press, I thank Joe Abbott, Lindsie Bear, Mari Coates, Mary Francis, and Caroline Knapp. I’ve also benefited from a generation of undergraduate and graduate students at Indiana University and the University of Chicago, who gave me the pleasure of introducing them to famous examples of film noir and made numerous smart observations about the films. I’m particularly grateful to these students for confirming my instinctive feeling that noir continues to be a vital and relevant subject of study.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My work on this project was assisted by fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, and the Office for Research and the Graduate School at Indiana University. Portions of the text, in somewhat different form, were originally published in Film Comment, Film Quarterly, and Iris: A Journal of Theory on Image and Sound. I am grateful to the editors of those journals—Richard T. Jameson, Ann Martin, Janice Morgan, and Dudley Andrew—for their encouragement and wise suggestions. Several libraries also provided assistance. I am particularly indebted to Sam Gill and the staff at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences and to the various professionals at the University of California, Los Angeles, Special Collections Department, the Library of Congress, the Museum of Modern Art Stills Archive, and the Lilly Library.

Five individuals were of special help, and I list them here in alphabetical order. Leo Braudy assured me from the beginning that I was on the right track and took me on a memorable tour of noir locales in Los Angeles. Dana Polan supported my proposal with his characteristic enthusiasm and generosity and offered many important suggestions for improving the final manuscript. Eric Rentschler wrote a careful and intelligent report on my first draft, helping me to see parts of it more clearly. Jonathan Rosenbaum was both my culture hero and my friend, reading parts of the work in progress and giving me the benefit of his astute critical perceptions and inexhaustible knowledge. Robert Stam praised my work throughout and was continually willing to write letters of recommendation.

Among my colleagues at Indiana University, Patrick Brantlinger and Barbara Klinger were strong intellectual influences, and I hope they will recognize how much I owe them. A number of people offered information or encouraged me through conversation and letters—especially Christopher Anderson, David Anfam, Eva Cherniavsky, John Dyson, Jonathan Elmer, Tom Foster, Terry Hartnett, Joan Hawkins, D. K. Holm, Cimberli Kearns, Michael Morgan, Justus John Nieland, Mark Rappaport, Robert Ray, Teller, François Thomas, Alan Trachtenberg, and Peter Wollen.

I was unusually fortunate in having Edward Dimendberg as my editor at the University of California Press. Ed has written a great deal about film noir and will soon publish a book on the topic. I have never had an editor who was so informed and perceptive about my particular subject matter. Throughout, I was amazed by his broad knowledge of twentieth-century culture, his willingness to supply bibliographic information, and his close attention to details. He is certainly not responsible for my errors or misjudgments, but I would not have done as well without him. I am also indebted at the Press to Carolyn Hill and Scott Norton, who saw the book through production.

Finally, as always, I owe thanks to Darlene J. Sadlier, who gave me moral support, companionship, and intelligent criticism, and who endured the whole process with remarkable grace—in part, no doubt, because she likes film noir as much as I do.

INTRODUCTION

THIS IS WHERE I CAME IN

When I was at the cinema age (it should be recognized

that this age exists in life—and that it passes) I

never began by consulting the amusement pages to

find out what film might chance to be the best, nor

did I find out the time the film was to begin.

ANDRÉ BRETON, As in a Wood, 1951

For most people, the term film noir conjures up a series of generic, stylistic, or fashionable traits from certain Hollywood pictures of the 1940s and 1950s. There are, for example, noir characters and stories (drifters attracted to beautiful women, private eyes hired by femmes fatales, criminal gangs attempting to pull off heists); noir plot structures (flashbacks, subjective narration); noir sets (urban diners, shabby offices, swank nightclubs); noir decorations (venetian blinds, neon lights, modern art); noir costumes (snap-brim hats, trenchcoats, shoulder pads); and noir accessories (cigarettes, cocktails, snub-nosed revolvers). There are also noir performances, often associated with the radio voices of actors like Alan Ladd and Dick Powell; noir musical styles, consisting not only of orchestral scores by Max Steiner, Bernard Herrmann, and David Raksin, but also of mournful jazz tunes, the essence of which have been captured on two retro albums made in the late 1980s and early 1990s by the Charlie Haden Quartet; and noir language, derived mainly from the hard-boiled speech in Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. (Is there any way to win? Jane Greer asks Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past. There’s a way to lose more slowly, he replies.) To the informed tourist, there are even real places, especially in Los Angeles, that seem bathed in the aura of noir: the Alto Nido residence hotel at Franklin and Ivar, just up the street from where Nathanael West wrote Day of the Locust; the Bradbury Building, featured in several movies and later chosen as the site of a P.E.N. ceremony honoring Billy Wilder; and most of all, the Glendale train station at night, looking much more colorful and charming than in Double Indemnity, where it was blacked out by wartime restrictions on lights.

These signs of film noir have influenced countless Hollywood directors of the poststudio era, who often recycle them or use them as a lexicon for parody and pastiche. Meanwhile, in the literature on movies, a slightly more complicated discourse on noir has grown steadily over the past three decades. Numerous books and essays have been written on the topic, usually analyzing thrillers or crime pictures of the 1940s and 1950s in terms of their cynical treatment of the American Dream, their complicated play with gender and sexuality, and their foregrounding of cinematic style. We might say, in fact, that film noir has become one of the dominant intellectual categories of the late twentieth century, operating across the entire cultural arena of art, popular memory, and criticism.

In the following book, I do not deny the importance or relevance of our culture’s pervasive ideas about noirness, but I treat the central term as a kind of mythology, problematizing it by placing the films, the memories, and the critical literature in a series of historical frames or contexts. One of the most important of these contexts, about which I say rather little in the book proper, is undoubtedly my own personal history, and I should perhaps acknowledge that determinant here at the beginning, before proceeding with my critical and scholarly concerns. The best place to start is in the mid to late 1950s, shortly before and during my adolescence, when the movies were still a relatively cheap form of entertainment. Television had not yet come to every household (my father purchased our first set around 1955), and most neighborhoods had second-run or rerelease theaters where the films changed every few days. At such places, moviegoing involved a feeling of circularity and flow; one often entered in the middle of a feature and then stayed to see the short subjects, the previews, and the opening one had missed. Even in the first-run venues at the heart of the city, it was not unusual to watch the show in a nonlinear or flashback style. Hence the popular expression, This is where I came in.

I always liked the pictures about urban adventure. As a child at the Saturday matinees, I preferred The Bowery Boys or Boston Blackie to Roy Rogers. At the most visceral level, I was less a connoisseur of city movies than a lover of the air-conditioned darkness and quicksilver imagery of the theaters themselves, which offered temporary release from the humid southern towns where I lived. In my early adolescence, I often assumed a semifetal position, knees against the seat in front of me, absorbed not so much in the stories as in the photography, performance, and sound. What I remember best are the fetishized details—Lizabeth Scott’s unreal blondness and husky voice in Dark City, or Edmond O’Brien’s rumpled suit as he runs desperately down the crowded street in D.O.A.

Later in the decade, after I began to acquire an artistic interest in movies, my imagination was fired by black-and-white photography and melodramatic danger. This was the age of Elvis and cinemascope, but I was stunned by Killer’s Kiss, a cheap thriller about which I had heard nothing. (I can recall exiting the theater and searching the poster outside to find that the name of the director was Stanley Kubrick.) I especially liked such films when they offered nonconformist philosophical or social criticism and when their endings seemed a bit less than happy. Among my favorites were the rereleases of Detective Story (a police procedural about a violent cop who learns that his wife once had an abortion), The Asphalt Jungle (a blow-by-blow account of an attempted robbery, in which the criminals are the most sympathetic characters), and Ruthless (a rise-to-success narrative that depicts the hero as a heel). I was equally affected by first-run showings of The Wrong Man (a true story about an innocent man accused of a crime), End as a Man (a frightening portrait of a charismatic young sadist in a southern military school), Sweet Smell of Success (a dark satire about an influential Broadway columnist and a sleazy press agent), and Attack! (an antiwar movie in which most of the officers are either insane or corrupt). For similar reasons, I was delighted by the blending of menace and iconoclasm in a couple of escapist pictures about romance and suspense: His Kind of Woman and Strangers on a Train. During those years, I bought a paperback reprint of Raymond Chandler’s Simple Art of Murder and virtually memorized the tough-guy cadences of the title essay. I also saw part of an Orson Welles picture for the first time—the grotesquely sinister opening sequence of Journey into Fear, which I glimpsed late at night on a snowy television set.

How intriguing to discover, long afterward, that I had been living through the last decade of historical film noir. I say historical because the basic term can refer both to the present-day cinema and to an extinct genre. The temporal distinction seems important, and yet it is also simplistic or misleading. Most contemporary writing and filmmaking associated with noir provokes a mourning and melancholy for the past, made all the more poignant because the objects being mourned are still with us on TV. To use a specifically Freudian language (which many of the old films themselves seem to elicit), our contemporary fascination with noir may entail a sort of Nachträglichkeit, or a method of dealing with the present by imagining a primal scene. The memories I have just recorded are no exception; they are influenced by things that happened afterward, and they omit many features of the complex popular culture I once experienced.

The term film noir was barely known in America when I went through what André Breton calls the cinema age. But it was not completely unknown. In a recent anthology of writings on the subject, Alain Silver and James Ursini have published a 1956 photograph of director Robert Aldrich, standing on the set of Attack! and holding a copy of Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton’s Panorama du film noir américain. Perhaps Aldrich was trying to tell us something about his work—or perhaps he was merely acknowledging the fact that Borde and Chaumeton greatly admired his previous picture, Kiss Me Deadly. At any rate, during the years before the classic Hollywood studios were completely reorganized, before a wave of innovative European cinema began to enter the American market, and before I myself had ever heard of film noir, several pictures that today’s critics often describe as noir cohered in my own mind and helped to give me a sense of movies as an art.

More than Night pays these and other movies like them an indirect tribute, offering a wide-ranging and synoptic discussion of American film noir between 1941 and the present. My topic is large, and in covering such an extensive time period I inevitably fail to mention some important titles. For example, I decided to keep influential directors such as Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles, about whom I have written elsewhere, slightly at the margins of my study—this despite the fact that the burning R at the end of Rebecca and the burning Rosebud at the end of Citizen Kane echo one another, and despite the fact that both films are crucial to the way we think about Hollywood in the 1940s. I nevertheless discuss European and British pictures that influenced Hollywood, and I pay a good deal of attention to the French intellectual context in which the idea of noir was first articulated. I also nominate neglected titles as films noirs, or at least question their absence in previous writings, and I explore the noir elements of the other media in some detail.

In order to do justice to the paradoxes of history, I shuttle back and forth in time. The reader will find that my early chapters have more to do with classic Hollywood and that my later ones are increasingly concerned with the present day. Even so, the book is not strictly chronological, and (somewhat like the old Hollywood moguls) I do not expect that everyone will consume what I have produced in linear fashion. I can only suggest that those who want to understand my general assumptions should go directly to the first chapter, which is my true introduction and touches upon most of my themes. In chapter 1, I contend that film noir has no essential characteristics and that it is not a specifically American form. I also try to confirm the truth of a recent observation by J. P. Telotte, who says that all arguments about the nature of noir have as much to do with criticism itself, especially with the varying ways that we define film genres, as they do with our putative objects of study.¹ Telotte’s point was reinforced for me shortly after the first draft of my chapter was written, when I saw Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. At the beginning of that movie, two gangsters talk about the difference between cheeseburgers in Paris and cheeseburgers in the United States. One of them notes that Cheese Royale sounds better than Big Mac. Along similar lines, I would suggest that because film noir sounds better than a good many American terms that might be used, it has affected the way we view certain mass-produced items.

Like almost every other critic, I begin by calling attention to the fact that film noir is an unusually baggy concept, elaborated largely after the fact of the films themselves. I suspect, however, that the often-expressed critical concern over the term’s meaning and utility may arise out of a misunderstanding of how generic or historical concepts are formed. The logic of genre construction has not been my primary interest, but it may help to note in passing that much can be learned about such matters from cognitive scientist George Lakoff’s Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (1987), which sounds rather like a film noir. (Interestingly, the 1932 adaptation of The Maltese Falcon was called Dangerous Female, and the working title for the Billy Wilder–Raymond Chandler adaptation of Double Indemnity was Incendiary Blonde.) Lakoff is a powerful critic of the Aristotelian notion that categories are made up of items with common properties—a notion also rejected by empirical research and by such diverse theorists as Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. R. Austin, and Jacques Derrida. Virtually all contemporary language philosophers agree that people do not form concepts by placing similar things together. Instead, they create networks of relationship, using metaphor, metonymy, and forms of imaginative association that develop over time. As a result, every important term in art criticism indicates something like the family tree that British critic Raymond Durgnat once used to describe film noir.

Cognitive science prefers to avoid Durgnat’s organic imagery; it argues that categories form complex radial structures, with vague boundaries and a core of influential members at the center. But neither tree diagrams nor radial structures are employed by most film historians, who operate within the realm of what Lakoff calls objective semantics and hope to classify movies according to their necessary and sufficient characteristics. Perhaps the very word genre, with its etymological links to biology and birth, promotes a kind of essentialism; but even when writers about film noir claim to be speaking of something other than a genre, they keep trying to list its definitive traits. To avoid troubling anomalies, they sometimes argue that the noir form is transgeneric. The problem here is that such an argument also applies to the ostensibly stable genres: there are western musicals (Oklahoma), western melodramas (Duel in the Sun), western science-fiction pictures (Westworld), and western noirs (Pursued). The fact is, every movie is transgeneric or polyvalent. Neither the film industry nor the audience follows structuralist rules, and movie conventions have always blended together in mongrelized ways. By the same token, every important category is shaped by what Lakoff describes as a chaining technique that develops historically and socially. Certain items along the chain will be connected in different ways and will be utterly unlike others. (Clash by Night has nothing specific in common with Laura, even though both movies have been called noir.) Thus, no matter what modifier we attach to a category, we can never establish clear boundaries and uniform traits. Nor can we have a right definition —only a series of more or less interesting uses.

As will be seen, my own approach has less to do with cognitive theory than with cultural and social history. It may seem odd, however, that after questioning most of the usual generalizations about film noir in my first chapter, I go on to use the term in a familiar way and to employ a more or less conventional historiography. I would explain the apparent contradiction by pointing out that film noir functions rather like big words such as romantic or classic. An ideological concept with a history all its own, it can be used to describe a period, a movement, and a recurrent style. Like all critical terminology, it tends to be reductive, and it sometimes works on behalf of unstated agendas. For these reasons, and because its meaning changes over time, it ought to be examined as a discursive construct. It nevertheless has heuristic value, mobilizing specific themes that are worth further consideration.

The subsequent chapters of my book explore these themes, but I often qualify or challenge what is normally said about them. In chapter 2, I consider the literary basis of dark thrillers in the early 1940s, arguing that our typical view of pulp fiction is oversimplified and that the original films noirs can be explained in terms of a tense, contradictory assimilation of high modernism into the American culture industry as a whole. Chapter 3 deals with the related problem of noir’s so-called resistance to Hollywood norms. Although I claim that film noir as a whole has no essential politics, in this chapter I concentrate on a specific set of noirlike movies from the years immediately after World War II and show how a political movement or cultural formation within Hollywood struggled against censorship and political repression by using dark thrillers for critical ends.

The remaining parts of the book are increasingly devoted to the relationship between historical film noir and the present-day cinema. In chapter 4, I discuss the economic determinants of Hollywood movies and the widespread critical tendency to canonize certain types of B pictures. I argue that many classics of so-called low-budget film noir were actually intermediate-level productions, designed to cross over into respectable areas of the market during a period when the B movie itself was dying off. I nevertheless try to illustrate the charms of specific B movies and to show how a tradition of low-budget crime melodrama carries over into made-for-TV films and video-store erotic thrillers.

Chapter 5 deals with motion-picture style, but I do not attempt to discuss this theme in a comprehensive way. Such a task would probably be impossible; as I indicate early in the chapter, there has never been a single noir style—only a complicated series of unrelated motifs and practices. Even so, noir is commonly identified with certain visual and narrative traits. I am interested in the way several of these traits have been used to support an ongoing tradition of neo-noir, and I have analyzed the problem under two of its aspects: first, the historical shift from an industry dominated by black and white to an industry dominated by color; and second, the increasing role played by parody, pastiche, and fashion in the development of a self-consciously postmodern genre.

In chapter 6, I discuss the central metaphor of darkness in the term film noir, arguing that one of its many implications is racial. As many critics have remarked, the classic films noirs are preoccupied with eroticism and decadence, often showing encounters between straight white males and homosexuals or sexually independent women; but many of these films also involve encounters with racial others. In order to call attention to the racial theme, I offer a brief history of the ways in which films noirs have depicted Asian Americans, Latin Americans, and African Americans. Much of the chapter consists of little more than a survey, but it ends by giving special attention to recent pictures directed by African Americans, on the grounds that black social-protest literature has always had an important connection with noir.

My seventh and final chapter is also a survey, but it has an even broader scope and a more loosely discursive organization. Here I discuss noir in the largest possible context, showing how our conception of the term is shaped not only by films and critical writing, but also by all the media that constitute the information age. This chapter concludes by offering a map of the contemporary theatrical marketplace and calling attention to the different market niches that film noir tends to fill. Its major purpose, however, is to indicate how pervasive and adaptable the idea of noir has become and to provide examples of how noir affects things other than movies.

Perhaps an alternate subtitle for the project might have been Seven Ways of Looking at American Film Noir, because each of my chapters takes up a slightly different viewpoint. In each case, I try to achieve comprehensiveness; yet the individual chapters could have been elaborated into separate books, and I have no illusions that they are the last word on the issues they discuss. At least I have been able to include historical data that cannot be found elsewhere, and I offer new interpretations of several familiar films. I hope that my indebtedness to other writers will be evident and that I have opened paths for subsequent critics to explore. Certainly there will be more writing on the topic. As we shall discover almost immediately, film noir is both a thing of the past, extending to a time before I came in, and a symptom of the media-obsessed present. It began in Europe, but it has now become a persistent feature of American culture and will remain so into the future.

1

THE HISTORY OF AN IDEA

Only that which has no history is definable.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, On the Genealogy of Morals, 1887

The past is not dead. It isn’t even past.

WILLIAM FAULKNER, The Sound and the Fury, 1929

It has always been easier to recognize a film noir than to define the term. One can imagine a large video store where examples of such films would be shelved somewhere between gothic horror and dystopian science fiction: in the center would be Double Indemnity, and at either extreme Cat People and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But this arrangement would leave out important titles. There is in fact no completely satisfactory way to organize the category; and despite scores of books and essays that have been written about it, nobody is sure whether the films in question constitute a period, a genre, a cycle, a style, or simply a phenomenon.¹

Whatever noir is, the standard histories say that it originated in America, emerging out of a synthesis of hard-boiled fiction and German expressionism. The term is also associated with certain visual and narrative traits, including low-key photography, images of wet city streets, pop-Freudian characterizations, and romantic fascination with femmes fatales. Some commentators localize these traits in the period between 1941 and 1958, whereas others contend that noir began much earlier and never went away.² One of the most comprehensive (but far from complete) references, Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward’s Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style (revised edition, 1992) begins in 1927 and ends in the present, listing over five hundred motion pictures of various stylistic and generic descriptions.³

Encyclopedic surveys of the Silver and Ward type are educational and entertaining, but they also have a kinship with Jorge Luis Borges’s fictional work of Chinese scholarship, The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, which contains a whimsical taxonomy of the animal kingdom: those belonging to the Emperor; mermaids; stray dogs; those painted with a fine camel’s hair brush; those resembling flies from a distance; others; and so on. Unfortunately, nothing links together all the things described as noir—not the theme of crime, not a cinematographic technique, not even a resistance to Aristotelian narratives or happy endings. Little wonder that no writer has been able to find the category’s necessary and sufficient characteristics and that many generalizations in the critical literature are open to question. If noir is American in origin, why does it have a French name? (The two Frenchmen who supposedly coined the term, writing separate essays in 1946, were referring to an international style.) More intriguingly, if the heyday of noir was 1941–1958, why did the term not enjoy widespread use until the 1970s? A plausible case could indeed be made that, far from dying out with the old studio system, noir is almost entirely a creation of postmodern culture— a belated reading of classic Hollywood that was popularized by cinéastes of the French New Wave, appropriated by reviewers, academics, and filmmakers, and then recycled on television.

At any rate, a term that was born in specialist periodicals and revival theaters has now become a major signifier of sleekly commodified artistic ambition. Almost 20 percent of the titles currently on the National Film Preservation List at the Library of Congress are associated with noir, as are most of the early volumes in the British Film Institute Film Classics series of monographs on famous movies. Meanwhile, neo-noirs are produced by Hollywood with increasing regularity and prominence. Consider the last three American winners of the Grand Prize at Cannes: Wild at Heart (1991), Barton Fink (1992), and Pulp Fiction (1994). Consider also such big-budget television productions as Twin Peaks, Wild Palms (marketed as TV noir), and Fallen Angels.

Some of these instances might be described as pastiche, but pastiche of what? The classical model is notoriously difficult to pin down, in part because it was named by critics rather than filmmakers, who did not speak of film noir until well after it was established as a feature of academic writing. Nowadays, the term is ubiquitous, appearing in reviews and promotions of many things besides movies. If we want to understand it, or to make sense of genres or art-historical categories in general, we need to recognize that film noir belongs to the history of ideas as much as to the history of cinéma; in other words, it has less to do with a group of artifacts than with a discourse—a loose, evolving system of arguments and readings that helps to shape commercial strategies and aesthetic ideologies.

It seems odd that film theorists did not arrive at this conclusion long ago. After all, the Name of the Genre (or mood, or generic tendency, or whatever) functions in much the same way as the Name of the Author. In a well-known essay, French philosopher Michel Foucault argues that the author function is tied to the institutional system that encompasses, determines, and articulates the universe of discourses.⁴ The author, Foucault says, is chiefly a means of textual classification, allowing us to establish relations of homogeneity, filiation, authentification of some texts by the use of others (147). At bottom, these relations are projections, governed by belief in a point where contradictions are resolved, where incompatible elements are at last tied together or organized around a fundamental and originating contradiction (151).

Could we not say exactly the same things about the genre function? And could we not ask of it many of the same questions that Foucault asks of authorship: What are the modes of existence of this discourse? Where has it been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate it? (160) In the case of film noir, one of the most amorphous categories in film history, these questions seem particularly apt. To answer them, this chapter examines the historical context of seminal writings about noir. Throughout, instead of looking for the essential features of a group of films, I try to explain a paradox: film noir is both an important cinématic legacy and an idea we have projected onto the past.

NOIR IS BORN: PARIS, 1946–1959

The end of World War II in Paris gave rise to what might be called a noir sensibility; but this sensibility was expressed through many things besides cinéma, and if I had to choose a representative artist of the period, it would not be a filmmaker. Instead I would pick the somewhat Rimbaud-like personality Boris Vian, who was a friend of the ex-surrealist Raymond Queneau and the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. Vian wrote witty avant-garde novels, protoabsurdist plays, satiric columns for Les temps modernes, music criticism for Jazz Hot, and over five hundred Dylanesque protest songs (including Le déserteur, which remains an anthem of French antiwar movements); meanwhile, he played trumpet and sang in Le Tabou and other Saint-Germain nightspots. During his lifetime, however, he was best known for a roman noir that did not bear his name.

In the summer of 1946, Vian was approached by an editor who wanted to create a list of murder novels that would rival the popular, black-covered Série noire, recently inaugurated at Gallimard. Within two weeks, Vian composed J’irai cracher sur vos tombes (I’ll spit on your graves), which he published under the name Vernon Sullivan, an identity he adopted on several occasions, claiming to have translated Sullivan’s work from the American.⁵ An ultra-violent mixture of situations from William Faulkner’s Sanctuary and Richard Wright’s Native Son, the novel concerns a black man who passes for white in a southern town and exerts racial vengeance by dominating, raping, and murdering two white women. In a preface, Vian said that the book could never have been printed in the United States because it involved black violence against whites. But there were also problems in France, where J’irai cracher became the first novel to be prosecuted for obscenity since Madame Bovary. The case took a bizarre turn when a middle-aged Parisian salesman strangled his young mistress and committed suicide in a hotel room near the Gare Montparnasse, leaving an open copy of the book next to the murdered woman’s body, one of its grisly passages underlined. Vian was briefly jailed and required to pay a fine, and for the rest of his life he suffered from notoriety and ill health. Although he remained active on the literary and cabaret scenes, he sometimes described himself as "ex-écrivain, ex-trompettiste" (ex-writer, ex-trumpet player). Then in the summer of 1959, he entered a Paris movie theater to watch a press screening of French director Michel Gast’s adaptation of J’irai cracher, a project he disliked but had been unable to prevent. As he sat alone in the dark auditorium, his heart failed and he died.⁶

The themes and motifs of Vian’s life and work—indigo moods, smoky jazz clubs, American fiction, and romantic isolation—resemble those in movies of his day, and his scandalous novel foregrounds two issues that seem relevant to film noir: sexual violence and racial blackness or otherness. Psychoanalytic feminism tells us something about the first issue (much feminist theory grows out of the study of American films noirs), although the discussion needs to be historicized and linked to changing patterns of censorship.⁷ In regard to the second issue, we need to examine the metaphor of darkness. The discourse on noir grew out of a European male fascination with the instinctive (a fascination that was evident in most forms of high modernism), and many of the films admired by the French involve white characters who cross borders to visit Latin America, Chinatown, or the wrong parts of the city. When the idea of noir was imported to America, this implication was somewhat obscured; the term sounded more artistic in French, so it was seldom translated as black cinéma.⁸

I say more about such matters in subsequent chapters; for now, however, the publication and eventual adaptation of J’irai cracher interest me for historical reasons, because they coincide with what I shall call the first (or historical) age of American film noir: the period between the postwar arrival of Hollywood movies in Paris and the beginnings of the French New Wave. We can never know when the first film noir was made (examples have been claimed as far back as D. W. Griffith’s Muscateers of Pig Alley [1912] and Louis Feuillade’s Fantomas [1913]), but everyone agrees that the first writings on Hollywood noir appeared in French film journals in August 1946—at exactly the moment when Vernon Sullivan was composing his novel. The term was used by analogy with the Série noire, and it surfaced in discussions of five features made before, during, and after the war, all of which had just been exhibited in succession on Paris movie screens: The Maltese Falcon; Double Indemnity; Laura; Murder, My Sweet; and—somewhat surprisingly, in light of the fact that it disappears from most subsequent writings—The Lost Weekend. Another picture released in Paris that summer, The Woman in the Window, described by one French reviewer as a bourgeois tragedy, was later to become a noir classic.⁹ The forthcoming Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer production of The Postman Always Rings Twice was mentioned alongside the initial group of five, and Citizen Kane, which was also mentioned, was placed in a class by itself. Critical discussion centered mainly on the first four thrillers—which, even though they were not exactly alike (The Maltese Falcon does not have a first-person narrator or flashbacks, and Laura is not based on a hard-boiled novel), seemed to belong together. These films would become the prototypical members of an emergent category, and they would have an unusual influence on French thinking for over a decade.

In one sense the French invented the American film noir, and they did so because local conditions predisposed them to view Hollywood in certain ways. As R. Barton Palmer observes, postwar France possessed a sophisticated film culture, consisting of theaters, journals, and cine-clubs where movies were treated as art rather than as commercial entertainment.¹⁰ Equally important, the decade after the liberation was characterized by a strong resurgence of Americanism among French directors and critics, many of whom sought to refashion their art cinéma along the more authentic lines of Hollywood genre movies.¹¹ A nouvelle vague would eventually grow out of this dialectic between America and Europe, and the so-called film noir—which was visibly indebted to European modernism—became the most important category in French criticism.

FIGURES 1–3. Which of these films was not described as an American film noir by French writers in the summer of 1946: Laura (1944), The Woman in the Window (1944), or The Lost Weekend (1945)? Answer on p. 13. (Museum of Modern Art Stills Archive.)

The French were also predisposed to invent American noir because it evoked a golden age of their own cinéma. They were quick to observe that the new Hollywood thrillers resembled such Popular Front films as Pépé le Moko (1936), Hôtel du Nord (1938), and Le jour se lève (1939)— a group of shadowy melodramas, set in an urban criminal milieu and featuring doomed protagonists who behaved with sangfroid under pressure.¹² The term film noir had in fact been employed by French writers of the late 1930s in discussions of these films. Film historian Charles O’Brien points out that in the years immediately before the war, the word noir often had pejorative connotations and was frequently used by the right-wing French press in